New Works Salon XXXII

Saul Levine Notes After Long Silence (1984–89)
16 minutes, Super 8, color, sound.
“… Levine’s cut-up style highlights the splice marks, film cement and 18-frame gap between sound and image in Super 8 film editing. Its roughly hewn surface mimics the image, repeated throughout, of the destruction/construction site of the subway being built in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The jackhammer is both a phallic symbol and percussion instrument as it is intercut with a blues musician, images of sexual intercourse, a toy woodpecker, a soap opera on television, Gerald Ford, and a myriad of other images and sounds. Self-reflexivity is characteristic of Levine’s style, and one is not surprised to see the construction site frame, the subway, the television screen and other film referential images. Levine’s grammar is set up to join media images without hiding the seams; media images of race and sex, love and violence, work and play, and presence and memory blend into a song of sorts of our time.” (Marjorie Keller: “Saul Levine’s Notes After Long Silence,” Visions, 1992.)

Saul Levine Falling Notes Unleaving (2013)
13 minutes, Super 8 on 16mm, color, silent.
“Falling Notes Unleaving is made from footage gathered in the fall of 2012 and edited in early 2013. Anne Charlotte Robertson, friend and fellow super8 filmmaker, died. I attended her funeral and filmed the burial of her ashes. She was famous for her diary films and I thought it important to honor her work by filming an event she could not. The burial took place in a wonderful old cemetery in Framingham MA, which lightened a sad event. The film also includes footage shot in the mountains outside of Portland and the streets of Cambridge and Somerville in Massachusetts. It is not a diary, the title and the film reflect Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Spring and Fall. Luther Price, Bob Brodsky, Tara Nelson, Gordon Nelson, Liz Coffey, Heather Green, her daughter Rosealee, her dog Blue and many other people and animals appear in this film.” (Saul Levine)

Saul Levine Light Lick: Pardes: Wild Blue Yonder (2015)
17 minutes, Super 8 on 16mm, color, silent.
“Light Licks are a series of films, which are made frame by frame often by flooding the camera with enough light to spill beyond the gate into the frame left unexposed. Light Licks are ecstatic flicker films inspired by jazz, improvised music and accounts of mystic visionary practice. “Pardes”: ancient Persian for walled garden. In Hebrew and Aramaic: paradise, heaven, the garden of Eden, the peak or terminus of ecstatic visionary, trance flight. “Wild Blue Yonder, the song of the U.S. Army air corps that my father and my uncle Ray were in when I was born in 1943, riding the echoes of that anthem light full in the opening decades of the 21st century.” (Saul Levine)

Eve-Lauryn LaFountain We Are the Explorers (2016)
13 minutes, Super 8, b/w, sound.
“This film was mostly shot during a trip to New Mexico and features the EPFC Famiglia in Joshua Tree on the first day of 2015. Undercurrents of the legacy of colonialism and missionaries are present in the 90th annual burning of Zozobra, and an ascent to an ancient Kiva. Clues of place and history appear in the sound collage of personal field recordings. There’s mention of cutting off Juan de Oñate’s foot, drones, and an Ojibwe burial song recorded at LaFountain’s grandmother’s funeral, which is used here as a blessing for the ancestral people of Bandelier National Monument.”

Marquita Flowers Blacnovela (2016)
3 minutes, Super 8, b/w, silent.
Marquita Flowers is a Bronx based multidisciplinary artist currently interested in stories/memories and the transformation, mutilation, decapitation that occurs to them over time.